tle by little the street became dim and vague. Two or three futile
oil lamps were lighted, and the shop fronts shone brightly, but all
the rest grew dark, like a river or a canal instead of a street. One
heard voices, and then people showed themselves momentarily as they
passed through the lamplight.

While she watched them passing, her thoughts drifted into generalized
sadness.

The shutters went up at the saddler's, and she saw Mr. Allen for a
moment--a long, thin man, looking too tall for the frame of the
lamplit doorway. Mr. Allen used to have a fine business but he was
spoiling it by his folly. It had been his custom to go to neighboring
meets of hounds and ask the young gentlemen if the saddles he had made
for them were satisfactory, insinuate his fingers between saddle-tree
and hunter's withers to see if there was plenty of room, and generally
render himself obsequiously agreeable. That was good for trade. But
then the hunting gradually fascinated him, and he followed on foot
throughout the season, halloaing hounds to wrong foxes, standing on
banks and frightening horses, being a nuisance to the gentlemen, and
coming home to boast that although he was fifty he had walked
twenty-seven miles in the day. And his trade was all going or gone,
and he not seeming to care. His wife let lodgings to make up a bit.
Very sad.

Candle-light showed in a window of the house next door to the
saddler's, and Mavis thought of these neighbors--two sisters, old
maids--who had a very, very little money of their own and who
endeavored to add to what was barely enough for necessities by selling
butterfly nets, children's fishing-rods, stamp albums, and picture
post-cards. Two years ago the elder sister tumbled down-stairs and
injured her spine; and since then she had been bedridden, lying in the
upper room at the back of the house, with nothing to amuse her but a
view of the graveyard behind the church. Mavis had been to see her one
day this summer, had sat by the bed, and read her a chapter out of the
New Testament and then the weekly instalment of a novel in the
_Rodhaven District Courier_. Extremely sad.

Then livid-faced, matty-haired Emily Frayne passed by, carrying a
brown-paper parcel. This poor overworked girl was the only daughter
of Frayne the tailor, who was a confirmed drunkard. All day long she
was kept toiling like a slave, cutting out, beginning and finishing
gaiters, breeches, and stable-jackets, doing all the work